Monday, February 22, 2016

2016 Astros - Projected

Time for our fourth (almost) annual season projections. In case you missed the first few, here are links to 2012, 2014, and 2015. To recap, 2012 was horrible (74 projected wins, 55 actual wins), 2014 was pretty good (72, 70), and last year was close-ish (81, 86). Last year I didn't see Lance McCullers going from a 5.47 ERA in Lancaster in 2014 to arguably the best rookie pitcher in baseball in 2015. I also didn't have Correa factored in at all, had Keuchel regressing slightly, and missed on Valbuena's power spike.

The same general disclaimer applies: "Now, anytime you put together projections the goal isn't necessarily to be perfect. You're looking for a likely outcome for each player, yes, but my goal isn't so much each player but the team as a whole. Some guys are going to have unexpected breakouts and some are going to deposit feces on their mattress, but the idea is that you can project a reasonable baseline of expectations for the team as a whole."The biggest question marks for me this year are: 1) Who gets the playing time at 1B, 2) Which pitchers step up into the SP4 and SP5 roles, and 3) How are the bullpen roles going to shake out.Enough words, here are the numbers.

There is some rounding involved, so the individual totals may be slightly different than the team totals. Looks like a pretty good improvement, but it should be noted that last year's Pythagorean record was also 93-69.

13 comments:

Would you believe that, other than Gattis with 88 rbi, no Houston hitter last year had more than 68? I think that's in part due to the flexibility Houston has in their lineup construction, especially in the OF, and the instability of their 1B situation. For example, if Reed gets 550 plate appearances, his RBI total would prorate to 83. Also consider that, since our lineup is fairly balanced with power up and down the roster, we don't have to depend on the 3-5 hitters to knock in all the runs. Which is a long way to say ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also, this projection for Rasmus would actually be a .034 drop in his OPS.

Reasonable suggestions. With McCullers I did think about the rumblings of an innings cap for him this year, but he totaled 164 innings last year (milb, mlb, playoffs) so I didn't think 180 was unreasonable. I also think Feldman will be the long/swing man with Fiers and Fister getting every opportunity to stay in the rotation due to a somewhat higher upside. Of course, if Fister is toast, that would change things, but the projected difference in performance from Fister to Feldman might move the needle one win at most.

Perhaps not, but a .721 OPS is probably only about 5% below average next year. It probably depends on how the rest of the team is performing, sort of like how they let Carter go almost the entire season last year. 340 plate appearances would be about 80-85 games. If they're struggling, you're probably right, he won't make it that far. If they're winning anyway, they'll probably give him more rope which would let them keep Reed at AAA longer.

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